Creating a Strategy: Week 3

Decide Where You Want to Go: Exploration, Understanding, and Empathy

Post 3 in our 12-week series on Creating a Strategy.

Now that you know where you are, you can explore where you want to go. This will involve spending a few weeks exploring new ideas, new markets, and new customers. It will require going beyond the obvious into the more innovative. It may also include exploring areas of interest you’ve already thought about. Then, you will narrow and focus on the ones you want to pursue first.

There are four steps in the process of deciding where you want to go:

This week, we’ll focus on exploration. This means understanding, empathizing, and thinking beyond the obvious.

Exploration

Exploration takes a broad view of what might be possible, and requires you to be open-minded and seek to learn. You need to understand and empathize with your user or potential user and then push your thinking beyond the obvious.

To achieve this, utilize the following tools and techniques:

Understand and Empathize:

• Interviews — Interviewing allows you to connect with individuals directly, to hear about their experiences, wants, needs, and points of view firsthand. You can interview customers, key stakeholders, team members, or prospective customers. To learn more and see a how-to guide, check out our Interviewing resources, here.
• Observation — Observation is the process of viewing and learning firsthand, in context, without interacting or interfering with the situation or the individuals. Observation allows you to see what people are actually doing, rather than what they say they’re doing. Use observation to help you understand real user wants and needs, as well as to empathize with them and their current challenges. To learn more about observation, here.
• Review Data and Analytics — Utilize your own data or seek outside data to understand your users, your market, or industry trends. Read customer complaints, read customer reviews, look at your current customer demographics and any changes to these over time. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by this type of information, so be mindful you don’t go too deep into these sources. Use them as background information and for general context.

Think Beyond the Obvious:

• Analogous Research — Analogous Research looks into the world for inspiration, insights, or ideas. It is used to broaden one’s perspective and to spark new ideas. You’re looking to see what you can learn from other experiences, products, or solutions, inside or outside your category or market. You can discover what works and what doesn’t. You can learn more about Analogous Research, here.
• Competitive Review — Take your work on your unique value proposition (UVP), current customers, current market, and the competitors you identified in week 2, and look across them. (Need a refresher? Check out Week 1) Which competitors are doing things you should consider? Which are doing things that are unexpected? What’s interesting? What can you learn about what you might want to do or not do? Use your competitors to spur your thinking, then pull out any key insights you have.
• Foresight — Foresight is the practice of looking to the future to consider what might happen, and using that to explore multiple possible future scenarios. A possible future is a hypothesis on what the future might be. Creating possible futures allows you to consider the implications of possible situations and make more informed decisions today. To learn more about Foresight, check out our resources, here.

Exploration using these tools and techniques allows you to create user-centered, user-focused inputs in which you can synthesize and begin to create your own unique point of view. These are vital as you begin to create your own strategic path forward.

If you’re following along with this 12-week series, get your work done this week! Next week, we’ll take your exploration activities and begin to synthesize them.

If you need a review, check out the previous newsletters in this series:

• Week 1: Unique Value Proposition, Current Customers, and Current Market
• Week 2: Competition, Current Challenges, Initial Ideas and Aspirations

To learn more about any of the tools and techniques mentioned in today’s newsletter, check out our Resources section on NorthomeGroup.com.

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